MAcintosh 512Ke Repair Adventures

Over the past couple of months I have been spending a small amount of my little spare time trying to repair a Macintosh 512Ke. I have got it to the point that the Mac turns on fine and seems stable, but I have no System disks to boot it on. I've been preparing for this moment and have followed a convoluted path to get me closer to my goal.

The 512Ke, Plus and SE all have 400K/800K floppy drives, so I can't make boot disks on my PC. I had a Powerbook 160 which had a dead PSU, and I didn't know if it ran or not. Recently a Powerbook 100 came up for auction locally for NZD 4.50 (approx USD 3) and the seller confirmed that the "screen lit up" and she could move the cursor around. This was enough to convince me that it probably worked but had a dead HDD. On receipt of the PB my guess was confirmed - I've never heard such a bad sound coming from a hard drive, and I've heard a few bad ones before.

I was about to try to source a replacement, working HDD for the PB 100, when I recalled the PB 160 I had sitting "in storage" with a dead PSU. Sure enough, the PB 160 booted fine once I swapped the PSU. the next step will be getting System 4.1 images onto the PB 160 from the PC, them writing them to fresh DSDD 800K floppies. The sealed boxes of DSDD 3.5" floppies I had put aside turned out to be DSHD, so I still need to find some blank, reliable DSDD floppies.